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November 28, 2010

Congratulations on clicking through to my website (or not) from Astro Toy! Did you know that "MAXIMUM MAXIMUM MAXIMUM MAXIMUM" is not the only thing Jam Project has been known to say? Other words to live by include "GO INTO THE STORMY NIGHT I CAN'T STOP BURNING HEART!" Let's see for ourselves, and become better, stronger people.

November 24, 2010

I haven't been doing a lot of writing about anything in the past couple weeks, actually, and I figured I would make good on something I've been saying to myself that I'd do for a long time now: mid-series posts on current shows. The "preview" format is inherently frustrating because you can say so little, waiting for the whole thing to finish means you lose that group feeling of watching it together, and frankly the longer I wait on an idea, the less likely I am to post.

So I want to talk about a show I already wrote up at Colony Drop two months ago when it started running. Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt is the only show I'm "current" on, as in I don't leave the house on Fridays without watching the new episode. I'm not even current on Super Robot Wars, and I want to watch Princess Jellyfish but I just haven't. (You know how it is with stuff you feel like you should watch? I'm just a low, low, low brow kinda man.) This show is legitimately exciting, though. This tale of a pair of self-absorbed, vice-addled angel sisters versus a procession of bizarre ghosts is, without question, unlike anything you've ever seen.

Of course, the show draws a lot of its uniqueness from its influences. I know how weird that sounds. But what I mean is that anime, especially lately, is often only informed by itself. Anime based on books written for anime otaku, you know? It feels like a creative feedback loop. So much is predictable (whether accidentally or by intent) and explicitly categorized. This show is drawing from a different pool, and even though the lifitng is so blatant (and often outright infringes on copyright), it keeps us guessing. You can't predict Panty/Stocking, and you can't neatly categorize it either.

The show's homages and experiments continue to surprise. An early episode intimately retold both the average Hollywood teen flick and the average American celebrity sex scandal. Another episode brutally abandoned the cartoon look, took a detour to Japan (the town next to Daten City, of course) and told the too-true-for-this-show story of a sad salaryman on the edge with our favorite bitch angels only appearing in passing. Another episode was a pitch-perfect episode of the 80s Transformers cartoon.

The show's at its best when it's either being experiemental, over-the-top or both: there have been by-the-numbers episodes here and there, like the zombie episode, that are merely average. The best episodes make one stupid joke-- like nostril sex or dieting gone wrong-- and spend ffifteen minutes literally stretching it until it becomes a horrific laugh-monster, which is finally put out of its hilarious misery by the heroines. Other episodes have been action showcases: the double-length "evil twins" episode is stunning.

To say that this is merely a gross-out humor show or a one-gag pony is doing its style a tremendous disservice. It's true that the characters all have one note and little more-- Panty only cares about sex, Stocking (a fellow blogger) only cares about candy, Garterbelt is a pedophile, and Brief is innocently in love with Panty-- but the run of this show has so far shown that they really work well as cartoon characters, crude, filthy little things that attack their ludicrous situations head-on with yet more ludicorous means. Except for Garterbelt, whose single joke just hasn't been funny enough.

You know what is funny? Japanese magical girl voice actresses swearing profusely in English while clubbing a zombie cat over the head with sex toys. I could watch a whole episode of that, and after the zombie episode I feel like I already did.

If you like cartoons or ever did, give this show a shot. It's not for everybody just on account of how screamingly profane it is, but I think you'll love it. And the music kills.

November 15, 2010

So the Astro Toy column that went up yesterday also contains a miniature review of the Black Rock Shooter anime, and I thought I would talk about the anime in a little more depth than I did. Before you read this, read that.

I called the short a failure, but at the same time I praised Ordet for not making what I expected to see: some half-ass, licensed property bullshit. The show they made was dull, mind, but at least it's well-directed and insistent on being quality animation. I actually think they were trying, here. Ordet has some dignity about slumming it. (Of course, it is a debut work for them, but...)

I've been thinking about what could have led to this show since I wrote the article, and I think it's yet another case of adaptation hell.

You've got this character who's so popular that her anime debut was inevitable: the only problem is that she's a non-character. She's a character design. There's nothing else there, and any studio that took her up would have to figure out the story too. This is actually a really tough proposition.

What if a large portion of the fan base for the character decides that the Black Rock Shooter you came up with doesn't match up with the one that they've been imagining? That backlash could end up reflecting back onto the character, and maybe the whole franchise-in-the-making could crumble on account of some ambitious anime staff.

(As a related aside, did you guys see how Idolmaster self-destructed? They added boy idols to their game, and the fans revolted. From the moment the first trailer (the game is not yet released) showed this, sales for that franchise have plummeted. Ko told me!)

So Ordet solved this problem by making an hour-long anime that actually leaves the character of Black Rock Shooter completely empty: the only thing she says in the entire anime is that she is, in fact, Black Rock Shooter. Keep vague relation Hatsune Miku in mind, too: remember that she is so popular specifically because she is blank: ready and willing to be projected upon.

The business with the parallel universes is where it starts to go wrong. Black Rock Shooter's identity is just attached to this new character, and it's now Ordet's mission to make you care about her. And they figured that a generic schoolgirl in a generic schoolgirl drama would resonate most with their audience. There really isn't a trace of originality in this thing at all, just naked demographic-courting: the script is by the author of Haruhi, the character designs immediately evoke K-On, the three girls are pure, flat archetypes. Such a drama is obviously far, far removed from this character, though, whose sole characteristics are her straight face and her big gun. It's a terrible idea, but it's calculated, and they think it's what you people want.

Of course, now we rightly start to feel that hey, wait, this cartoon is about somebody else entirely! Why am I, the theoretical BRS fan, even here? We're already on really shaky ground, and Shooter has to be involved in some capacity or we don't have a show at all. So there are these gorgeous fight scenes in a crumbling, post-apocalyptic world-- really the only thing that the audience for this character ever asked for-- abruptly forced into the schoolgirl story at times that don't really benefit it. As I said in the review, it's more like they said "it's been five minutes, cut to girls with weapons" rather than this story symbolizing or punctuating the other, which if I recall was kind of intended to be the premise of the whole damned thing.

Ultimately, the show winds up a jumbled mess that's somehow both created-by-committee and way too ambitious for its own good. If Ordet had trusted their audience, they might have been able to make this concept work, but they didn't. They want to both tell a real story (again, an utterly bland story) and hedge their bets by pandering to the fans every five minutes, and that's not how it works. In retrospect, only the production values are actually any good.

If I'd been one of the guys in charge of this project, I would have had them put together 15 minutes worth of fight scenes without any context and called it a day. This wasn't a project to be ambitious about, frankly.

November 04, 2010

Hirameki International was a company that only could have even existed during the too-optimistic anime boom of the early oughts: these folks’ main business was publishing visual novels, those religious texts (with pictures!) of the hardest otaku. Video gamers don’t buy VNs-- there’s not much game there, in the traditional sense-- and anime fans involved enough to even know what they are just pirate them like they do with everything else. Even at the time, visual novels were never really viable, particularly the weird “game-on-DVD” format that Hirameki tried to bridge the gap with.

So Hirameki gave anime distribution a shot with just about the only thing less marketable than a visual novel: Idol Fight Suchie Pai II, a one-shot OVA based on a Japanese strip mahjong arcade game. At least Kenichi Sonoda’s name was on the box!